There was one big thing missing from Samsung’s weird-yet-campy Samsung Galaxy S 4 unveiling last week: Google, the creator of the operating system the S 4 is running. While the Galaxy S 4 has Google's latest build of Android, Google has gone largely unmentioned. At the Samsung launch event, Android was hardly even a footnote. Yet there’s a lot of overlap between Android and some of the new S 4 features that Samsung showed off. That’s because Android is an open ecosystem that allows other developers to build on top of it. But it’s not just enough to build a phone that has the stock Android features — manufacturers have to be able to take that one step further, whether that’s with their own apps and services or a unique twist on Android’s basic services. Samsung added some next-generation functions to the S 4, such as the ability to recognize fingers that hover over the screen or track whether a user is looking at the screen.
Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal.